Belief

Belief, I would suggest, is stitched together out of three fundamental components: a capacity for memory (belief would be of no value if they came and went without any long-term hold on the mind), a capacity for inference (deriving new facts from old, as just discussed), and a capacity for, of all things, ‘perception.’

Superficially, one might think of perception and belief as separate. Perception is what we seeand hear, taste,smell, or feel, while belief is what we know or think we know. But in terms of evolutionary history, the two are not as different as they initially appear. The surest path to belief is to see something.. . . .

The trouble kicks in when we start to believe things that we don’t directly observe. And in the modern world, much of what we believe is not directly or readily observable. Our capacity to acquire new beliefs vicariously -- form friends, teachers, or the media, without direct experience -- is a key to what allows humans to build cultures and technologies of fabulous complexity. . . . .But largely, for better or worse, I tend to believe what I read, and learn much from what I know through that medium . . . Page 65